superstition and learned free-thinking-between slovenly fanaticism and popish pageantry-between enthusiasm and the rational worship of God, which is nowhere upon earth done, in my judgment, better than in the Church of England. I shall now show, likewise, that our predecessors, the Druids of Britain, though left in the extremest West to the improvement of their own thoughts, yet advanced their inquiries, under all disadvantages, to such heights as should make our moderns ashamed to wink in the sunshine of learning and religion. And we may with reason conclude there was somewhat very extraordinary in those principles which prompted them to such a noble spirit as produced these works, still visible to us, which for grandeur, simplicity, and antiquity, exceed any of the European wonders.

"That the doctrines and works of the Druids have hitherto been so little considered (since authors only transcribe from one to another the few remaining scraps to be found in classic writers), was an incentive to me likewise in the following attempt, and at the same time it pleads for me, and bespeaks the reader's favour. I want, likewise, the great advantages to be had from a knowledge of the remaining Celtic languages, books, manuscripts, and history,-the Cornish, Welsh, Irish, Highland, &c.—the chief repository now of their doctrines and customs so that, in my own opinion, I may very well say with the poet,

"Interea Dryadum silvas et saxa sequamur

Intactas, tua Mecænas haud mollia jussa.'-VIRGIL.”

I have already referred more than once to the stone monuments of a prior age still existing in the parish of Kirk Michael, in the central recesses of the Grampians of Perthshire, and have stated that, according to my present views, they enable us to prove demonstratively, that, as they are found in that remote district in every form in which we see them in the more southern parts of Britain, they must be the products of a people

holding the same religion and social faith, and animated by the same principles.

Those truth-searchers who may not have the opportunity of visiting in person these imperishable monuments, are referred to the 72nd, 73rd, and 74th pages of Chalmers's Caledonia, vol. i., where they will find ample proof that every specimen of what have been commonly called "Druidical" constructions are still to be seen in that narrow locality.

I am not going to enter into all the follies and ignorance connected with what has been commonly called "The Pictish Question," but have no hesitation in affirming that the "Picts were our brothers in language, blood, and, anterior to the Christian faith, in religion also.

They, in their last retreat from foreign aggression, still retained the faith which they had inherited from their fathers; and their various "stone circles," their "upright stones," and what we are now obliged to call "Cromlechau," prove that they were the same people who erected similar buildings from north to south, from east to west, through all the extent of Great Britain and the adjacent islands.

But the particular object of these my letters is to prove that the ancient "cromlech" was something more than a sepulchral monument, and that, though it might have been used as such at a later period, it is still to be found as a common adjunct, but not as a necessary one, of "the circles the circles" called "Druidical," and of other stone constructions generally supposed to be intimately connected with the religious worship of

our ancestors.

To prove this common connection of the "stone circle" with that construction which I must call a cromlech," I again refer to the 74th page of Chalmers's Caledonia, vol. i., who thus enumerates the many places in North Britain where the "cromlech" and "stone circle" are found in juxtaposition.

"Many cromlechs are connected with Druid circles; and several appear without circles. In the parish of Old Deer, in Aberdeenshire, there is a num

ber of Druidical circles; the most entire of these is on the hill of Park-house, and has a large cromlech, the top stone of which is fourteen feet long, contains about two hundred and fifty solid feet, and rests upon other two large stones placed on their edges. In the enclosure of Kipp's house, in Linlithgowshire, there is a Druidical circle, having one or two erect stones in the centre, and a large cromlech near it. In the middle of one of the Druidical circles, in the Isle of Arran, there is a cromlech, consisting of a large broad stone, which is supported by three lesser ones. In the parish of Castleton, in Roxburghshire, there is a cromlech, at the south end of a large oblong carn, near the north end of which there is a Druid circle, on a high ground. Near a mile north from the Church of Baldernock, in Stirlingshire, there is a circular plain or area, of about a hundred paces in diameter, and surrounded by an ascent of a few yards in height, in the form of an amphitheatre; within this area or enclosure, there is a remarkable cromlech, which is called the 'Auld Wives' Lift,' and this area appears, from the remains, to have been once covered by a grove of oaks."

You may well imagine that it is not vanity or love of fame that tempted me to embody these deductions from a long series of actual observation, and a course of reading on the subject, in the ephemeral pages of a newspaper; but a conviction that in the present awakened state of Cambrian Archæology, it is of the greatest importance that the young and active minds among us, and who feel as we feel, should, as far as it can be done by me, find the field of investigation open and patent, and not be liable to wander into labyrinthine mazes, in which they are more likely to be lost than bring back to us any valuable information. If there be any truth embodied in my communications to you under this head, it is this-that the stone monuments commonly supposed to be connected with the Druids," and hence called "Druidical," were the works of a race of men who occupied this island, from north to south, from east to west, from times far anterior to history, and who were not temporary sojourners, but the possessors of, and dwellers in, the land-in short, that they were our own immediate ancestors, whether called by the ancients, "Cimbri," "Britones," "Veneti," or "Albani," or by ourselves, "Cymry," Lloegrwys," "Gwyr Gwynedd" or Gwent," or "Gwyr yr

Alban."

I wish to rouse the young members of our community to a due sense of the glorious inheritance they have inherited from their Titan ancestors, and to impress upon them this vital truth, that the loss of national spirit necessarily induces a paralysis of all the nobler feelings, and that a man who is ashamed of an accident which he cannot help-of "his brethren according to the flesh,"-necessarily induces every alien of generous feeling to look upon him as a renegade, to whom he will give reluctantly the wages of his treason, and still despise the recipient.

In connection with the parish of " Kirk Michael," I have to call your attention to the name of the Patron Saint, and to affirm that, to my knowledge, many churches, whether denominated "Kirk Michael," "Cilmichael," "Saint Michael," "Llanfihangel," &c., were built on localities which had been previously consecrated to heathen worship, and that Saint Michael was there installed as the Patron Saint to supplant and expel his old enemy and antagonist the Devil.

III.

EXTRACT FROM AN UNPUBLISHED ARCHEOLOGICAL PAPER.

Or these ancient stones of testimony, whether originating in a wish to commemorate great events, to honour departed heroes, or to celebrate public worship in union with a system of auguries, and of religious sanctions for civil law and political intercommunion, I think we may safely enumerate certain classes.

First, the Maenchwiv or Maensigl, the Rocking, or Logan Stones. Specimens of this class are mentioned by ancient writers as objects of wonder in their age. Thus, in the third chapter of the History of Ptolemy Hephaestio, we have this remark" Concerning the Gigonian rock on the shores of the

ocean, and that it is moved by a single stalk of the asphodel, although not to be removed by any application of force.' Pliny, lib. ii. cap. 93, writes :-" Near Harpasa, a city of Asia, stands a rock, horrenda,' movable with a single finger, but when pushed, resisting all the force of man." And Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautics, book ii., describes a stone in the island of Tenos, poised on the summit of a tumulus, and moving in obedience to the impulse of the wind. Examples of this kind are to be found in all parts of Great Britain and Ireland, of which the construction must be ascribed to the remotest ages. As in the Craven dialect such a stone is called a "Roggan,' I infer that "Logan " is a corruption of it, and that the English expression," rocking a cradle," is borrowed from one of these movable rocks, just as the dismantled "Maenchwiv" at St. Orme's Head, was called the Cradle of Tudno. "Rhoc" is a pure Cymric word.

Some people believe that all such stones are natural, not artificial, just as an antiquated school of natural philosophers ascribed fossil shells to certain freaks of Nature.

Sir Robert Sibbald, the Scottish antiquary, had seen one of them dissected, and describes the motion as depending on two tenons within narrow cavities, with the lower end of the one poised upon the upper end of the other.

Second, the Megalithic Chamber, of which the monument in Kent, called "Kit's Cotty House," is a complete specimen. It answers almost exactly to the description of the "adytum in the temple at Delphi, as we find it in Pausanias. Of the same character is a similar structure in Glamorgan, of which there is a model in the British Museum. The district in which it and other monuments are situated, is called " "Dyffryn Golych," the Vale of Worship. The whole ground, originally a Druidical Tεevos, seems to have been transferred to the see of Llandaff, of which it was one of the granges.

Third, huge stones, in general of a tabular form, resting on uneven supporters, so short as to leave no sufficient room 1 "To log the cradle," is still used in Devonshire.